CBI is Congress Bureau of Investigation: BJP

The Bharatiya Janata Party on Monday accused the Congress of using the Sohrabuddin encounter case to promote its vote bank politics ahead of the Bihar assembly polls.

BJP chief Nitin Gadkari told journalists that his party was ready to legally and politically fight the case filed against former Gujarat minister Amit Shah.

"The BJP will face the legal challenge presented by the fabricated prosecution in a court of law. I declare that the BJP also accepts the political challenge thrown by the Congress and will take the issue to the people of India," said Gadkari.

"We are sure that the Congress' game will fail and its nefarious designs will be exposed," Gadkari said.

He termed the CBI as the Congress Bureau of Investigation and alleged that the agency discriminated against the Gujarat government.

"The Sohrabuddin encounter probe by the CBI was to target the BJP and to keep the Congress out. This is evident from the fact that though then Andhra Pradesh government of Y S Rajasekhara Reddy was equally involved in the arrest and encounter death of Sohrabuddin, the CBI completely left out the government from the radar," he said.

"This is despite the fact that the Supreme Court had specifically observed that the identity of the seven police personnel of Andhra Pradesh who had accompanied Sohrabuddin was not known in the probe conducted by the Gujarat government and that was one of the reasons for the Supreme Court handing over the matter to the CBI," Gadkari claimed.

The CBI has not bothered to interrogate the Andhra Pradesh government or its police officials at all, he said. "What other proof is needed to show that the CBI did only what the Congress would have liked it to do," Gadkari said.

The 'persecution' of Shah in the Sohrabuddin case was a political strategy of the Congress to divert attention from the United Progressive Alliance governments 'failures on all fronts', Gadkari said.

"The government has failed to tackle inflation, infiltration in Kashmir, the Naxal menace and even the foreign minister's Pakistan visit has failed. The Congress strategy, being implemented through the CBI, is clearly to vitiate the atmosphere against Shah," he said.

Under the UPA's rule, terrorists are treated with biryani and those patriotic police officials and their political bosses who deal with terrorists are humiliated like hardened criminals, he claimed.

By fabricating false and frivolous charges through the CBI, and by arresting Shah, the UPA government has declared a political war on the best performing state government in the country led by Narendra Modi, he said.

Calling for a national policy on encounter killings, Gadkari said, "If every encounter killing is suspect, then there must be an overall national policy on how to handle encounter killings. It is difficult to understand why the Gujarat government is chosen for a different, hostile treatment by some human rights activists and the central government".

"If such things continue, then would police kill criminals? Who will fight terrorism," he said.

The Congress has always used the CBI against political opponents, Gadkari claimed. "Some recent examples are the politically motivated handling of cases against Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayavati and Jayalalithaa," he said, adding that the CBI has always been virtually a political instrument of the Congress.

"The UPA has been using CBI against its political adversaries as a weapon of vendetta, for political friends as a protective umbrella and for those in between as a threat to make them fall in line," he claimed.

Disclosures by Lashkar-e-Tayiba operative David Headley about Ishrat Jahan, killed in an encounter by the Gujarat police in 2004, clearly proves the motives of the central government and the human rights activists targeting Gujarat government in several cases, including the Sohrabuddin case, Gadkari said.

"It is evident that the whole story of examining Amit Shah to know his version was a farce. The CBI had decided to arrest him rather than examine him. This shows the true intent of the CBI action," he said.